We want our Rights not Magna Bollocks

Today is Magna Carta Day. The great charter was sealed on 15 June 799 years ago. As preparations begin for the 800th anniversary the people of England need to claim their rights and liberties not be subject to a self-congratulatory celebration.

After Edward Snowden revealed that the UK’s
security agencies are developing bulk surveillance of the metadata that maps
our lives in intimate detail, a surprising number of people said Britain needs
a “Fourth Amendment”. This would protect our privacy from “unreasonable
searches”.

When the Guardian was threatened by the
government for publishing the Snowden revelations and had its offending hard
drives pulverized, there were demands for a British “First Amendment” to entrench
freedom of the press.

Now
that the British state is holding secret trials and introducing 'Closed Material Procedures" (see Jo Shaw and Yvonne Ridley) , there is talk of the need for
aSixth Amendment, that anyone
accused “shall enjoy the right… to be informed of the nature and cause of the
accusation”, or even the Fifth, that
no one should be “deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process
of law”

But
there is a screamingly obvious problem with all such demands. We do not have a
constitution to amend. The United Kingdom does not enjoy fundamental laws
rooted in the sovereignty of the people. We cannot extend or strengthen our
basic rights as we do not have such rights, they remain gifted (and taken away)
by a sleepy, if not intoxicated, Parliament.

We
do have a constitution, of course. Peter Hennessy, now a cross-bench peer, once
took his students to meet the then Sir, now Lord, Robin Butler when he was
Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Civil Service. One of them innocently asked what
is the British constitution. Butler answered, “something we make up as we go
along”.

Who
is this “we” that makes it up? It is certainly not ‘We, the people’. When Sir
Robin was speaking, he was part of the last remnants of the old Establishment.
Now the British Constitution is something GCHQ makes up, as it goes along.

The
issue has added poignancy today, 15 June, when the Magna Carta was sealed by at
Runnymede, 799 years ago. Those Fifth and Sixth Amendments establishing the
rule of law in America trace their antecedents back to the Magna Carta’s assertion
that a freemen may not be condemned “except by lawful judgment of his peers”.

And
it is Americans who celebrate this. If you visit Runnymede, a pleasant meadow by the Thames,
between the M3 and M4 just west of London's Heathrow airport, you learn that it was thanks to an
American that the site was donated to the National Trust, while the monument
to the Magna Carta was erected by the American Bar Association in
1957. Indeed the only English contribution to memorialising the supposed founding
moment of Anglo-Saxon civilisation is the Magna Carta Tea House.

There
are good reasons for official embarrassment. We have a British-wide ruling
elite but the Magna Carta is a very English document, defining relations with the
Welsh, Scots, and Jews.

Conceded
under duress, it held a monarch to account, not an example to be encouraged. In
so doing it wrote down on parchment how we are to be ruled, rather than leaving
things to the informal instincts of generations of Robin Butlers.

It
exposed the influence of the Barons, thus permitting the awkward question of
who are their successors today (answer: not part of Michael Gove’s curriculum).

Though
now rarely acknowledged, the Charter was dubbed the Magna or Great Charter for
a specific reason. The use of ‘Great’ was not a formless puff, as in today’s ‘Great
Britain’. It linked the document to its minor companion, the Charter of the
Forests. This lesser charter set out the rights of regular people to access and
use of the public commons. It even, it has been argued, imposed an ecological
commitment to their maintenance.

Finally,
the Greater Charter enshrined claims to due process and the right to trial by
jury, pillars of the rule of law that today are openly regarded as impediments
to national security; and always regarded as suspect by officialdom.

Thus
any authentic celebration of Magna Carta would be a sober, serious challenge to
the status quo, unlike the celebratory website proclaiming “The
Magna Carta has been the most valuable export of Great Britain to the rest of
the world”. For all its eulogies it cannot bring itself to reproduce the actual
Magna Carta itself, let alone the Charter of the Forests.

This
is not to make an anachronistic claim that the Magna Carta was ‘progressive’. It
was a feudal deal. It is the myth that matters: an inspiration to challenge arbitrary,
despotic power; a seed for a democratic constitution; a right to be ruled by
law; and even, thanks to its companion Charter, a claim that land be held in
common not enclosed for profit.

To
snuff out all such radicalism, the official celebrations of its 800 years will
be funded twelve months hence by £1million from chancellor George Osborne and
we will be palmed off with an assortment of Magna Bollocks, to express
gratitude to Britain’s ruling order gifting liberty to the globe.

That
is how Margaret Thatcher saw it after 1989. Unable to prevent the unification
of Germany she planned to use a Paris Summit on European security in November 1990
to launch a Magna Carta for Eastern Europe. I attended the press conference, in the ballroom
of the British Embassy and asked her, “Prime Minister,
why, when you called upon this Summit to entrench rights across Europe, do you
not agree with Charter 88 that we should have entrenched rights in the United
Kingdom?” She replied, “We are in this Summit to get rights way across the
European Divide... to call for the Community to extend democracy to other
countries…”.

Within three days, British democracy such
as it was, forced Thatcher to resign. Let’s hope that the curse of the Magna
Carta brings down our present bunch of manipulative populists. Eight hundred
years of rule by Barons is enough. It is the peoples’ turn. We do not just need a Magna Carta for the World Wide Web as Tim Berners-Lee has called for, we need a democratic
constitution: to govern Parliament now that it has been corrupted and suborned,
to define our relations with Europe and secure our claims to
privacy, liberty and, in a digital age, our metadata.

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